All I want for Christmas is to have my football game back. You stole football from me and the rest of America these last two decades, and I’m really ready to have it back. Yes, I blame you Media Types. The coaches may vote for the rule changes, and the Commissioner may be more powerful than the President—but these people all read your columns and watch you on television, and it’s your favor they try to curry. How have you ruined America’s Game? Let me count the ways:
You write and talk for a living. I don’t begrudge writers a living; I am one myself, and wish I were making what you are to string those illiterate sentences together on dallascowboys.com and nfl.com. But your incessant chatter becomes gospel to millions of people who don’t know any better. And you frequently miss the real point of football. This is the ultimate team sport; the only sporting event truly 100% analogous to human existence (who among us hasn’t found himself facing 4th and long in life..with a decision to punt or go for it?). And yet you persist in trying to draw moral equivalence between football and other sports. You get paid to talk all year long about all sports, and for that reason we are subjected to “expert” analysis on basketball (still barely a sport in Texas), baseball (with its 150-game season), hockey (!), golf (yawn)…and now you even speak, with a straight face, about Super Gay Emasculated Wine-Sipping Pantywaist non-sports activities as though they ARE sports (soccer and cycling). You know a little about all of these, but not enough about the one that counts: football. You think you do, but you don’t. Let me help you out, transplants: football is the national sport of Texas, and that’s why the other sporting events can only dream of packing in audiences like pro football. You’ve probably noticed that 95,000 people don’t show up at Cowboys Stadium to watch synchronized swimming (20,000 sports writers on expense accounts, maybe). Here is Cardinal Rule #1: ALL SPORTS ARE NOT EQUAL. There is football season, and then there is that interminable wasteland of the year called Football Off-Season, where we sometimes pay passing attention to other humans competing in other stuff to make the off-season go faster. You are a sportswriter, but we are fans. And we appear to know a lot more about football than you do.
You have stolen our game through the way it’s presented. It was bad enough when you decided that football needed to be deliberately marketed to morons who couldn’t read a down marker (that’s when you came up with the imaginary on-field graphics). You patted yourself in the collective back about that one, but the other ways you changed the presentation of the game were disastrous. How many more times, for example, must we sit through that idiotic Fox Robot? And what makes you think we want to hear Shannon Sharpe say ANYTHING at all? Those of us who worked hard to get through school and make something of ourselves are generally stunned that someone is actually paying Michael Irvin to talk. It’s nice that you have interpreters on site, like Rich Eisen, but just because some guy made a nice living running pass routes doesn’t necessarily mean that he has a coherent thought floating around in his cranium. And you have profoundly misunderstood the nature of this game when it comes to “talent.” The twin tales of Vince Young and Andy Dalton are all you need to know. Remember when the dumber-than-a-bag-of-hammers Vince Young failed the Wonderlic test, and you all told us that it didn’t matter because of his superior physical abilities? And then he got onto a field and didn’t know how to lead? Or do you recall—just last year, mind you—how you dismissively sniffed to us that Andy Dalton just wouldn’t be able to cut it as a pro quarterback because he was too short and too slow? Those of us who know football watched him lead that TCU team like a field general, and saw that Staubach-esque quality in him that spells “quarterback.” You’ve repeatedly lectured us on how normal and right it is for a classless thug with no character to cheat his way through college and then leave after two years just to pursue millions (Reggie Bush, Cam Newton). To those of us who worked many jobs and sacrificed time to graduate college, seeing a Reggie Bush get handed a $250,000 education and then barter it away so he could drive a tricked-out Escalade is borderline criminal (or, in his case, actually criminal)—but in your world, it’s normal. And then you all sit around and ponder, with serious expressions on your faces, how it’s possible that Dez Bryant might be lacking in character and maturity. The worst way you’ve ruined our game is in your celebration of such jackanapeses—which, in turn, passes into the culture as “normative.” Every one of us who’ve watched football faithfully for four decades or longer would come out of the stands and yank our kids off the football field in shame if we ever saw them behave in some embarrassingly prideful display of Me First behavior in the end zone. And yet, rather than label Deion Sanders the Supreme Idiot that he was, you celebrated his showboating, his big mouth, his inattention to basic football details like being able to make a tackle. And now, a generation later, you have inflicted us with Terrell Owens, DeJackAss Jackson, and Ocho Stinko. Thanks, Media Morons. We taught our children that football was a sport to be played with character and class, and you proceeded to tell our kids that it’s just entertainment. It’s NOT. It’s a sport. There’s a difference.
And it wasn’t just the presentation of the game that changed: you altered the way the game itself is played. I’ll not elaborate on your shameful lobbying for overtime rule changes and the eventual success you had. Your disregard for the tradition of football betrays a shocking lack of trust in the men who invented it and made it great. Remember in the 1970’s and 1980’s when you got bored watching America’s Game and lobbied for rule changes to give the offense more of a chance? Now we might as well put a skirt on the quarterbacks; we wouldn’t want them to get hurt playing football or anything. Chad Johnson’s big mouth would be doing less talking and more bleeding if he ever had to run those routes against Mel Blount, Dick “Night Train” Lane, or Cliff Harris. Despite what you’ve done to our game, offense may sell tickets, but defense still wins championships….and you still don’t know that. And you get paid well to speak ignorantly of it, day after day. And don’t get us started on “resting starters” at the end of a season. Let me get this straight: we lived, with gritted teeth, through an entire off-season of draft news, basketball games, baseball hype, and preseason football to finally enjoy one tiny little 16-game season….and you want to shorten it to 12 games? This is football, and these guys make millions of dollars to play it. Stop worrying about their little pumpkin heads with the concussions. Stop trying to talk the rest of us into thinking that it’s ok to shirk the last two games of the season for ANY REASON WHATSOEVER. Teams that do that lose, plain and simple. Ask Coach Wade “Yuk-Yuk” Phillips and the 2007 Dallas “Cabo” Cowboys. I’ll type slowly so that even a sports journalist can understand me: there are 16 games in a season. We would like to watch all 16 of them. Guys get hurt playing football; it ain’t soccer. That’s why they get paid a lot more money than we do—to risk their health in this brutal sport. Now shut up and let us have our season back.
So give me my game back, Sportswriters. You stole it, we both know it, and I want it back. You still have the NBA, where the referees determine the outcome of the game and drug offenses are the norm. You still have cycling, and judging by all the sheep riding their ten-speeds on public highways decked out in objectively retarded-looking gear, you have something of an audience to write for. You still have the children’s spelling bee on ESPN. You can continue your quest to talk all of us into believing that just because soccer stops camel traffic in Saudi Arabia, we should give it a chance here. But for the love of all that’s American….give me back my beloved game of football. It’s all I really want this Christmas.
Well, that and a healthy Felix Jones for the playoffs.
